Two seasons in, The Orville remains one of the weirdest shows on network TV, an often-bizarre hybrid of smartass humor mixed with a sincere desire to recreate the fond Star Trek: The Next Generation memories of creator Seth MacFarlane’s youth. Or, we should say, “formerly of network TV,” because the show’s producers announced at Comic-Con today that it’ll be making the jump to the universe of streaming when it returns for a third season next year.
Yep, The Orville is no longer a member of the Fox family, and will now air exclusively on Hulu, where its first two seasons of fart jokes, sex jokes, and again, incredibly sincere Star Trek plots already await interested viewers. MacFarlane was very upfront about the reason for the shift, too: The show is apparently getting so ambitious in the scope of its sci-fi side that he didn’t see any way to get new episodes on the air in time for a midseason premiere, instead landing somewhere closer to the end of 2020. That’s obviously a tricky prospect for a network desperately looking to fill content after having much of its material gutted by the recent sale of 20th Century Fox to Disney, and so the deal was struck: Fox’s loss is Hulu’s gain, in terms of shows where Norm Macdonald plays a weird green blob monster, at least.